Wine coolers series#

There was a mass die-off among the regional brands there were even casualties among the big guys. After 1987’s peak year, cooler sales fell by double digit percentages in 1988, 1989, and 1990. When the end came for wine coolers, it came fast. Were these new flavors the logical outcome of brand expansion, or the frenzied spasms of a dying category, spawning mutant varieties in the hopes that one would find its niche? “We wanted to be Coca Cola,” Crete told me, “not Baskin-Robbins.” But as competition heated up, wine coolers began throwing out new flavors: citrus, peach, apple-cranberry, mixed berry, passionfruit, strawberry, cherry. Crete’s vision for California Cooler was one “classic” flavor. The first sign of trouble were the flavors. This is where the arc of wine coolers’ rise reaches its inflection point, and begins to describe the parabola of a jump over the shark. Then there was Sun Country Wine Coolers, which recruited a truly primo roster of celebrities-Ringo Starr, Grace Jones, Charo, sometimes wearing polar bear costumes-for its bizarre yet compelling ads. “It’s wet and it’s dry”- that was Seagram’s tagline. He prances across neon New York in a white suit to a subterranean wine cooler club he puts the moves on Sharon Stone, who coolly rebuffs him he sings the white guy blues on a porch with a shaggy dog.

Their pitchman was Bruce Willis, in his Moonlighting days, pre- Die Hard, back when he still had most of his hair and was basically a testosterone popsicle. “There’s no doubt about it.”) They soon took over the top spot from California Cooler. Crete told me that Frank and Ed were parody versions of him and Bewley. (They were played by David Rufkahr, an Oregon cattle rancher, and Dick Maugg, a California contractor.

Wine coolers series#

In 1985, Ernest & Julio Gallo launched Bartles & Jaymes with a series of ubiquitous TV spots featuring two endearing, elderly yokels, Frank Bartles and Ed Jaymes, purported creators of the eponymous wine cooler. “Every single tank in the state was full.”īut it was the giant wine and spirits companies that came to dominate, flooding primetime TV with their ads. “There was a lake, a lake of wine in California, in 1981,” Bewley recalls. That left American winemakers with a huge surplus. US wine sales had surged in the 1970s, but dropped in the go-get-‘em 80s, when a strong dollar made imports more competitive. “It was a different flavor profile, but in the same package.”Ĭalifornia Cooler also benefited from dirt cheap wine prices. “It was the logical alternative to beer for the gals,” explains Crete. Easy-drinking wine coolers, flavored with the goodness of fruit juice, particularly appealed to women. According to Jon Moramarco, editor of wine industry newsletter the Gomberg-Fredrikson report, health-conscious boomers coming of age in the 1980s were turning away from the hard-drinking habits of their martini-sipping forebears and looking for lower-alcohol options. Compared with fortified and pop wines, it had a relatively low alcohol content (6 percent ABV). The California Cooler was something different.